Things We Nearly Knew by Jim Powell: The enigma of other people

There’s nothing like getting your reading year off to a good start. Jim Powell’s Things We Nearly Knew continues 2018’s satisfying trend for me with its slice of American smalltown life seen through the eyes of an unnamed bartender. I’d enjoyed Powell’s second novel, Trading Futures, a couple of years back, admiring its narrator’s waspishly funny inner monologue. His new novel is infused with a gentler humour, the themes it tackles much weightier and all the better for it.

Our narrator runs a bar with his wife Marcie on the edge of the small town he’s lived in all his life. He looks after the evening trade, she does the lunches. They’re the perfect professional combination: he knows how to keep secrets, which questions to ask and which to leave unasked; she knows how to interpret the answers. However, they differ wildly in their approaches to life: he wants things cut and dried; she grasps the messiness of it all. One day Arlene walks in, all glamour and sophistication, asking for a vodka martini and whether they’ve heard of a man named Jack. She becomes a regular, if an intermittent one, telling only the stories she wants to tell. Marcie and the bartender are intrigued. She begins a romance with one of the other regulars, more from mutual loneliness than any sense of passion. Then the roguish Franky turns up, not seen for thirty years but barely changed. It seems that Franky and Arlene are made for each other despite his distinctly flexible relationship with honesty. Marcie and the bartender lie in bed at nights mulling it all over but they have their own stories to tell – one which he has been determined to bury but she has not, and another he knows nothing about.

Questioning, speculating, interested in other people and their problems – although blind to his own troubles – Powell’s narrator is the consummate bartender complemented beautifully by the astute Marcie. It’s such a clever device: backstories abound and anecdotes are legion as befits the profession. The story unfolds beautifully through our narrator’s memories as he looks back on the nine months Arlene occupied her bar stool, telling us her tale while slipping in details of his seemingly prosaic marriage, less transparent than he might have thought. Powell’s characterisation is intelligent and perceptive, his writing more striking that I remembered it:

Arlene was someone who invited protection, then declined it when it was offered.

Marcie and I have no secrets from one another. We tell that to each other constantly, so it must be true

Later, we’d take off the masks we’d worn for the occasion, pack them away, and put on our usual masks the next morning.

Overarching it all is the question how well do we know those we think we know? How well do we even know ourselves? A thoroughly enjoyable piece of storytelling, well turned out in every sense. If the rest of 2018’s reading is as good as this I’ll be delighted.

This type of novel can be very difficult to pull off. If it relies too much on anecdote then it can seem fragmented. Powell appears to have avoided this. He is a new author to me, but I shall look out for his books.

Choosing a bartender as a narrator allows Powell to thread anecdote and his characters’ back stories through the novel with ease. It’s a clever idea, not one I’ve come across before that I can remember.

I too enjoyed Trading Futures and this sounds irresistible – I love small town USA. Patrick De Witt’s first book also had a bartender narrator (Ablutions) but was more experimental in structure. Got to get this one!

Oh, that’s interesting, Annabel. Thanks. I’m sure you’ll enjoy this one if you liked Trading Futures. I’d say it’s even better although I’m not sure why Powell decided to set it in smalltown America, given that he’s British. That said, it works beautifully.

Bars have always struck me as a great vehicle for storytelling, for the very elements you’ve described finding in this novel. It sounds very sharp. I’ll keep an eye out for it. (Currently, the library has only his non-fiction for circulation, by the looks of it, but the collection is always growing.)